Results of the iOS Praktikum 2015

Results of previous years

Goal

This lab course covers mobile applications for smart devices, ranging from standalone applications, embedded systems including hardware and sensors to the design of modern interfaces for complex business applications. Students learn and apply software engineering and usability engineering techniques. This includes object oriented modeling and system design as well as the realization of graphical user interfaces, usability testing, continuous integration and continuous delivery. Real industrial partners provided the problem statements and acted as clients. 11 companies participated in the iOS Praktikum 2015, each with a different problem statement and its own team. More than 100 students delivered these applications using agile techniques and communicating continuously to their clients.

Project Overview

The following companies participated in the iOS Praktikum 2015. You can find details about the projects including videos of the final presentations and demos. We would like to thank Boinx TV for the continuous support with the video recording!

Program Management

Organization

The chart shows the project based organization of the course. All projects are shown as columns including information about customer, project management and student team. A team of eleven student coaches dealt with the project management of the teams. Furthermore cross-project teams with one member of each team (horizontal bars) dealt with different aspects during the project. The release management team was in charge of the right usage of version control, continuous integration, continuous delivery and feedback management. The architecture team was responsible for the subsystem decomposition and the architectural style of the system. The code quality team kept an eye on the right use of the git branching model and the incorporation of a pull request workflow with asynchronous pair programming. The modeling team was responsible for the documentation and the creation of informal models, i.e. trailer, mockups and UML diagrams to improve the communication of difficult aspects within the team.

Projects

Project: iCATCH

The iCATCH (Smart City Hub) is an upright head-high touch-screen which can be deployed in different environments such as public places and transportation systems.To people who are close to the device it offers several services like city information, mobility information or navigation services as well as the possibility to connect with other people who are nearby.The service implemented in this project allows people to play an interactive quiz game at public places and connects the developed iOS application with the Smart City Hub. Users can interact either with the Smart City Hub or with the iOS application on their iPhone.

Usually podcasts are known as an unidirectional way of communication, without the possibility to provide feedback to the producers. This is where PodCom comes in. PodCom extends the native Apple podcast player with social functionalities, such as commenting podcasts at a specific time. Other subscribers can reply to these comments. In addition, one can easily find the most trending and liked podcasts. Therefore PodCOM makes podcasts to social events and producers are able to discover the notion of the subscribers.

WireTab is a simple and intuitive way to manage your tabs. Create tabs, attach bills, and invite friends and family members to participate. Connect WireTab with Wirecard bank account, and link real bank transactions to the tabs. WireTab takes care of notifying participants to settle their shares, and keeps you updated as soon as you get your money using push notifications. Get an overview of all your expenses, along with a list of all open and closed tabs. Finally, paying tabs is simpler then ever with Touch ID, just ‘tap’ to pay your share using the Wirecard P2P API (person-to-person money transfer) to directly transfer the money to the tab owners bank account.

ILAS is an Incident Localization and Assistance System. It offers the possibility of documentation and maintenanceof an incident and transfers process oriented incident managementknowledge from IT Service Management (ITSM) to thedomain of manufacturing. ILAS offers real-time incident monitoring usingwearables, incident analysis support and knowledge sharing forincidents within and between different production sites.

Conada is a cute app that helps you to do collaborative workouts. You can easily find a workout buddy nearby via our integrated multipeer technology. The intuitive apple watch extension allows you to track and update your workout data anywhere. The nicely designed Conada app helps you easily keep track of all your workout data, create new workouts and set your workout goals. We believe you can achieve much more when working out together.

BMW Retail Analytics brings the concept of tailored advertisement to car retailers in form of a showroom explorer application. The location-aware iPhone app lets potential car buyers explore BMW cars in showrooms and thereby tracks the location and the behavior of these users using iBeacons. The application was tested and deployed in the Automag dealership in Trudering, Munich. Users can also request help notifying personell at the dealership, book test drives and open an external car configurator. Based on the behavior of the user and background information such as age and income, the analytics backend categorizes the user as a persona, a typical character with specific needs and attributes. Based on this persona, the app provides users with advertisement tailored to their personal preferences. Data scientists can see detailed analytics about the product popularity based on the personas.

The goal of this project was to investigate the possibilities of new smart environment technologies for improving the guest experience in a hotel environment. To this end a distributed system consisting of a backend, front end, a mobile app, room automation software, and the required infrastructure was developed by the students during a 3 months project. The target system had four high-level requirements to focus on: hotel public area, including features such as automatic check-in or access to the display in the lobby, showing individual information to every guest; room automation including features that allowed guest to control different aspects of the hotel room (such as lights, air conditioning, TV, etc.) from a single app; location-aware providing of information about interesting objects around the hotel; and immediate guest feedback.

With more that 3000 visitors per day the Bavarian State Library (BSB) is one of the largest libraries in Germany. In an area of more that 30,000 square meters on 5 floors, this library serves more than 3000 visitors per day with different facilities including books, magazine, and historical recordings. Being in a large building finding the way to a destination in BSB becomes a difficulty, especially for new visitors. Furthermore, many visitors are unaware of the different facilities provided by the library.

The goal of this project was to solve this problem by developing an indoor navigation solution for the BSB. The project included a research phase, in which the students investigated different radio-based indoor navigation technologies and frameworks. The product was an iOS app for indoor navigation in BSB using the indoo.rs framework and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons. The app will be available to public through the App Store soon. To realize the solution, the student not only programmed the iOS app, but also installed more than 300 BLE beacons along 5 floors of BSB and measured the signal in the whole area using the fingerprinting technique.

Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul of an Aircraft is often time sensitive and cost intensive. An airplane consists of many different parts. Even for simple tasks like ordering a spare part, multiple IT applications are involved. As a single spare part can be quite expensive, technicians often need the approval of a manager to place an new spare part order. Lufthansa Technik uses Business Process Management (BPM) to streamline approvals and reviews for spare part orders over multiple applications. However, they are insufficient, with respect to the mobile reality of decision makers, who frequently need to make decisions remotely and on-the-go.Fastlane, the iOS app developed in this project, brings spare part orders to mobile devices and BPM to the smartphone era. Through Fastlane, not only spare part orders but also other different business processes can be performed on the iPhone.

You want to be more active and live a healthier life? Allianz wants to help you to achieve this goal with the Allianz Healthy Living app. The iPhone app collects health data from a variety of HealthKit enabled fitness trackers (e.g. Apple Watch and Jawbone UP3) to provide a personalized health experience. The system is aware of your current health status and makes adapted suggestions for fitness activities. Through the application of gamification we keep you motivated and engaged in your personal health journey. You could level up and earn badges by completing health missions. Furthermore you have the possibility to collaborate with your friends, colleagues and family to accomplish a joint health goal. Finally our Apple Watch extension keeps you updated on the status of your current missions and collaborations.

The goal of the project was the development of a system that allows controlling the smart home environment from the interior of the car. The developed system is made up of three separate subsystems: The first subsystem is responsible for enabling the communication with the devices in the smart home. The second subsystem is the infotainment system of the Audi car that is used as a user interface of the system. The third subsystem is the iPhone application, that acts like a bridge between the car environment and the home environment. The application shows a user interface on the car’s infotainment system, listens to the commands coming from the user through the infotainment system and translates them to commands for the smart environment.